Excerpt from Legends of Louisiana: The Romance of the Royal Oak, And, the Brother of the Sultan One must regress into an earlier, more romantic, epoch to credit this love-story, for today few are given the understanding of the sacred arts, and rare indeed are the souls willing to suffer immod lation and the purification by that white fire which prepares one fitly to receive true passion. Our hearts are set to the horologe of haste - a tempo which Love flies in dismay. This is a century of tempest and defence and the recoil of the buffeted is to frivolity and a desperate carelessness rather than the repose of awesome Love. Our contacts are electrical rather than magnetic. Our touch is a grasp rather than the medium of a thrill. Therefore Love languishes and it may be will cease altogether. Instinct is not Love, so the world will go on and there will be posterity which will throb to cold ambition. Come to the hearth, then, and let us rake the em bers, for this thought is chilling. Presently we will be warmed by another fire, out of the cycles where dead Romance wakens at our call as if we might control the clarion of Domesday itself! New Orleans children - rather let us be explicit, Creole children - have been told for just a shaving off two hundred years, the tale of the live-oak on Bayou St. John, that slumbrous estuary whose ancient source was the overflow of the Mississippi. It is in indign company, amid the refuse of timber-remnants which may not even be used for patching in a shabby little ship-yard where keels of small craft are scraped of barnacles and decks renewed. It isvibrated throughout the day by the tick-tack of hammers and at night when all is quiet, by the occasional appulse of a street-car as it attacks the Esplanade bridge. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."